Jury trial or not, a judge is the one who decides on law and the jury has to follow him on that. A jury decides on fact.
- Except for when they don’t - hurray for Jury Nullification!
Yes, the guy did it, but, because of X (the law is a bad law, a white person would not have been arrested, etc.) the jury renders a verdict of “not guilty”.
This is illegal in every jurisdiction I know of, but kids - keep it in mind when called for jury duty.
There was a Federal Prosecution of a fellow for raising Marijuana. It was obvious he did it, so they convicted. This is CA - he was growing medicinal pot with a license from the State. Had the jury known that little fact, at least one made the news by saying she would have never voted for “guilty”.
I’d love to know why that fact was suppressed.
I was a judge’s assistant in California for many years and as such had the opportunity to watch a lot of lawyers pick lots of juries. I was always interested to learn what the lawyers were looking for in a juror. I learned that their criteria were as varied as their clients and the facts of their cases. Some wanted smart jurors, some wanted dumb ones. If one side wanted to waive a jury, the other side invariably didn’t.
Another thing I learned was that the only consistent thing about juries is, they are unpredictable as hell. Every jury is a culture unto itself. The results they yield will depend greatly on how that culture evolves over the course of the trial. A good attorney will know who the jury foreperson will be before he makes his opening statement.
I think most jurors try very hard to do their job well, but the complexity of the law has outstripped the ability of many to grasp their purpose. Virtually every mistrial I ever saw declared was as a result of juror misconduct – some willful, most not. Nothing more frustrating than spending 8 weeks on a complicated trial and then having to mis-try it owing to a “helpful” juror who brought a dictionary into the jury deliberation room because the jury was confused about a definition. The jury instructions often only confuse them; the terms of art don’t mean anything to them – even the smart ones. Lawyers bandy about terms like comparative negligence and causation, and those terms are meaningful to folks in the biz. To layperson jurors? Not so much.
My experiences showed me that most lawyers just go with their gut on whether or not to keep or excuse a juror. Some were good at picking juries and others weren’t. And yeah, the Rogue Juror is always the one to avoid, smart OR dumb.
Sorry for snipping up people’s quotes everywhere but I wanted to zone in the parts that twigged in my head.
Okay. I can sort of understand that someone’s personal knowledge is considered “information” and nobody but the lawyers are allowed to present the facts, so therefore someone’s personal knowledge is inadmissible. They would have to try and forget that they had it, and it’s impossible, so they would be excluded. I can sort of get that. What it relies upon though is the lawyers presenting the situation honestly and correctly. Then I get to this quote…
“He knew was wrong” being the important part. That would mean that the case is being presented untruthfully! Otherwise there wouldn’t be any “wrong” testimony. Isn’t it a good thing if an engineer can suddenly realize that the case is being presented untruthfully or that a witness was incompetent?
Which then brought me back to this, which basically says, “Lawyers want people who can be easily led through exactly what they want you to hear and nothing else.” That sounds…OK enough, since that is the aim of their job, until I think about the above quote. They don’t want you knowing if what they’re presenting has been twisted or some aspect has not been included.
I don’t know what to think about a system of law that works that way really. It all just seems very shady. The sum of the above means that lawyers depend upon malleable subjects; people that don’t know any better to challenge them or realize if anything is wrong or think on their own. (That doesn’t mean they want dumb people - just people that wouldn’t know anything about the specifics of their case in particular so must blindly accept everything that is presented to them).
Well, I guess I should be thankful both lawyers are involved in the selection process, at least…
Think of it this way: A juror is, essentially, a blank slate. It is the job of each side to present a version of the facts that will be favorable to their client (be it an individual or the State). If I’m on the witness stand and I’m being dodgy, sweating profusely, etc., a juror has every right to take that into account when they evaluate my testimony. Any lawyer worth his salt would tear into me on cross-examination, though, since I obviously was being evasive. But, even if they didn’t, you could still use my behavior on the stand as a factor in rendering your verdict.
I’m not entirely sure about the cause of your concern. A lawyer cannot outright lie (and would face heavy sanctions / repercussions for doing so) and it isn’t the job of the jury to challenge the facts presented. That’s the point of the adversarial system. The jury is to evaluate the facts presented by each side and make a decision as to their validity.
I think Macca’s concern, and its mine too, is that when only the lawyers and the judge are the arbitrators of what is allowed in the courtroom, in cases where a juror’s expertise in a particular field outweighs the law professionals, it is unfairly seen as biased instead of helpful, and the reasons are that lawyers are distrustful of that variable rather than sincerely impressed of the experience. To the non-lawyer, that attitude is condescending and insulting.
I think why they do this is that lawyers can be held accountable by the court for anything violating the rules, but a juror can’t, therefore if he can’t be punished, his personal judgement (with regards to the technical details) cannot be fairly used as an influencing factor. But its still insulting.
If I were a lawyer, I’d totally change up the system! I’d keep the engineer and tailor the testimony to convince him, so that he may use his expertise to convince the rest of the jurors. I may not be a good lawyer, but I’d be a good person, and that matters to me more.
Things like this happen.
I’ve been called to jury duty a few time, and actually served twice. In voir dire, when an attorney finds out I work with data, I got ‘Well, you know that the evidence isn’t just ones and zeros.’ I think I’ve come upon a way I can avoid jury duty if that ever comes up again. I can just say, ‘Yes it is. The outcome is binary, so it’s reasonable to apply Boolean logic to the evidence.’ 
Not that I don’t want to be on a jury. I find trials interesting. Only, I have very little time to get my work done, and serving on a jury would create a terrible backlog. But I also don’t appreciate being used as a pawn. ‘Let’s come to an agreement/plea bargain, or we’ll call a jury!’ It’s bad enough sitting in a jury pool. It’s worse being pulled away from a book or computer to stand around in a hallway while the offence says ‘See? There’s the jury right there! Better deal with me now!’ Have a trial or don’t. But don’t play games with me.
I am thinking that attorneys would not want me on their juries NOT because they want more stupid or more ignorant jurors but because they want jurors who are more… homogenous-minded, I guess you’d say. It’s hard enough to craft an overall message that will be well-received by 12 individuals without the additional complication of esoterically diverse mindsets. With that in mind, I think that a general preference for fairly normative people (ordinary everyday Joes and Susans) could be perceived as a preference for stupid and ignorant people, especially by folks who are quite proud of doing their own thinking and so on.
Let me add that “smart” or “not smart” is rarely even a factor. If we get three peremptory challenges, and only an hour or so for questioning 25 to 40 potential jurors, and half will say something in response to general questions by the Judge that need to be followed up, and you’ve got jurors who are obviously bad news for your case for one reason or another, you have, if you’re lucky, one challenge left where you really have some wide discretion on who to use it on. Should you pick the old woman who doesn’t speak English that well, or the teacher who seems great but is really upset to be missing the first two weeks of school? The point is, while you might go in saying “this is a case where we want smart jurors, or don’t want smart jurors,” at the moment of truth, other factors will be much more of an influence in 90% of your cases.
Well, no. His “sudden realization” is another man’s bias. I’ll get to it in a sec.
I’m gonna ask you to let me be a little high-minded and idealistic about this, but I think there’s good reason to be. You are saying “malleable,” and I understand you to mean that you think we want people we can snow with bullshit. I think you’re right that we want people who are malleable, in a sense. But I think all that means is we want people who are capable of change. Which is just rationality. We want rational people. Malleable under the heat of the facts, not under the heat of, like, my overbearing personality and shiny shoes or whatever*. But sure, malleable, because that’s how justice is served - by people deciding on the facts after they hear the facts.
A trial is an engine which is designed to have the truth spit out at the end, right? We have a shitload of rules and procedures we have implemented over the centuries, but they’re all designed for that purpose. Every little rule has some connection to the overall policy of trying to reliably determine what actually happened, and whether somebody did something wrong. The question we ask prospective jurors, over and over again, and in dozens of ways, is “do you believe that you will be able to fairly decide this case based upon the evidence presented?”. If they give us a reason to believe the answer to that is no, then sure, we send them packing, even if they seem smart or cool or honest. Because we don’t really care about anything other than them being peers of the parties, and willing to decide the case based on what happens at trial. This is not an unsound policy. It’s not selfish or shady; it’s actually extremely above-board. We want the trial – somebody’s day in court, on the record – to determine what happens to that person.
Getting back to your engineer, imagine that you are on trial for, ultimately, your livelihood. Imagine that your lawyers go out and get a bunch of technical experts, and pay them a shitload of money, to do the background work to establish that in fact, you did not fuck up when you installed some elevators. Imagine that based on the best and the brightest in the industry, you really genuinely believe that you didn’t fuck up the elevator. And imagine that the plaintiff brings in his own technical experts, and there are reports and diagrams and stuff exchanged, and all the experts have to sit up there at the stand and recite their qualifications and their educations and why it is precisely that anyone should trust what they have to say about elevators. And your lawyer asks the other experts some pointed questions and their lawyer asks your experts some questions, and at the end of it all you really think that it’s been proven in open court that you did everything you could have possibly done to not fuck up the elevator. Which is good, because you really don’t think you did fuck up.
Now imagine that the jury goes back, and some other engineer, whose credentials you have no idea of, who you don’t get to question or present any sort of rebuttal to, and who knows god-knows-what about elevators or about anything, really, is back there telling the jury “fuck those guys, that stuff wasn’t true.” And also imagine that he had told the judge and your lawyer before the trial that he would have a hard time accepting some other expert’s word about what happened in the case, because he’s an engineer himself and he knows what’s what.
That seem fair?
If the engineer on the jury is a better engineer, then yes, he has an obligation to explain why the elevator was faulty.
Better according to… ?
If we had an infallible and objective way of rating and ranking people’s testimony, then we could dispense with the jury itself.
And the rest of the jury members have an obligation to only consider evidence presented during the trial. So, they would be in their right to tell juror-engineer to STFU.
Icarus: they could, but isn’t it human nature to listen to an expert in a field, especially an expert with no agenda?
The experts the lawyers hire have the agenda to help their side. In the jury room, his agenda is to expose the truth.
which is why I want smart jurors. Smart enough to tell someone misbehaving in the jury room to STFU.
How do you know that the juror doesn’t have a secret agenda, or some other motivation? At least an expert on the stand can be subject to cross-examination, versus some self-proclaimed expert in the jury room trusting the others to take his word for it.
etv78, have you ever served on a jury? The judge gives explicit instructions to only consider the testimony offered in the courtroom.
No I haven’t. Ironically, if I wasn’t in rehab right now, I would have earlier this summer.
You’re right to chastize me for not question the motives of the engineer on the jury. But do you agree at least that the expert witnesses have agendas too?
I don’t think any expert witness is completely altruistic (seeing as how they get paid quite well), and I do know of certain attorneys who have their “go-to” people when it comes to certain subject matters, because they know how the expert might testify. Remember, though, these people have a reputation to keep.
If an expert witness gives blatantly false testimony, that could both hurt them in their normal line of work, and it could go to exclude them from being an expert witness in the future. (Courts typically require an expert witness to “prove” their credentials, and if opposing counsel comes back with evidence that the proffered cardiologist has said repeatedly that the heart is located in the pelvis, the judge would not allow the doctor to serve as an expert)
If it’s a matter of reasonable differing professional opinions, then that’s why opposing counsel has the right to cross-examine the witness, as well as call an expert witness of their own, to refute the testimony.